“It’s like that shower scene in Psycho. You’re naked, you’re wet, and there are guys with knives who don’t like you. You can’t be more vulnerable than that. That’s why I showed that bath scene, not in a Bourne-movie kind of impressionistic, quick-cutting way where you don’t really see what’s going on, but where you saw everything that was going on. Because if you’re going to be Nikolai for the time of this movie, following this character, or as we used to say, identifying with him, I want you to have his experiences. So I feel like I would be cheating my audience to do it off camera, or out the window, or some other way.

23 skidoo? As of press time, the 23rd Boston Film Festival was still shaping up.

You don’t know Dick You’ve got to figure that a guy who makes a film about a performance artist who nails his penis to a board isn’t going to worry about getting a PG rating. Peter Keough interviews Kirby Dick (mp3) Rating the raters: Kirby Dick goes after the MPAA. By Peter Keough

It’s all true Here’s a selection of non-fiction books that the Phoenix liked this year, in alphabetical order by author.

B List rewind Boston Phoenix film critics salute The Fly , King Creole , and The Conversation in The National Society of Film Critics latest tome.

Freedom Train Thanks for including the MBTA in your list of free-speech abusers, or “Muzzle Awards.”

Oliver's army While he refers to himself as a “dramatist” rather than a historian, Stone has positioned himself as Hollywood’s gatekeeper to America’s post-war past. Feel-good movie of the summer: Oliver Stone: from the Hollywood crackpot of JFK to the Republican sellout of World Trade Center. By Peter Keough Off-Center: Oliver Stone's trite take on 9/11. By Peter Keough

The plots thicken Eight years after the destruction of the World Trade Center — the result of one of the most devastatingly successful conspiracies in history — Americans still take comfort in paranoia.